SD-15.4 — Distribution Strategy & Channel Management

Business Domain: BD-15 Distribution, Product & Client Management (Commercial) · Applies: BOTH

Purpose

Defines the firm’s distribution model and manages the channels it reaches the market through. SD-15.4 decides how the firm’s products get to investors — direct institutional, intermediated and wholesale, platforms and the ETF ecosystem — manages the economics of each channel, and drives geographic and market expansion. It is not the selling into a channel — that is SD-15.7 Institutional Sales — and it is not marketing, which is SD-15.5; SD-15.4 sets the channel strategy, the others execute within it.

Service Operations

Set the distribution strategy — define the firm’s distribution model and the channels it will use, by client segment and geography.
Manage the channels — manage the firm’s distribution channels — direct, intermediated / wholesale, platforms, the ETF ecosystem — and the relationships behind them.
Manage channel economics — manage the economics of each channel: the distribution fees, the platform terms, the rebates.
Drive market and geographic expansion — assess and execute expansion into new markets and geographies, including the cross-border fund-distribution registration.
Analyse distribution performance — track flows, redemptions and net sales by channel, product and geography.

Inputs and outputs

Inputs: the product range from SD-15.3; client-segment and demand data; the cross-border distribution framework; flow and net-sales data.
Outputs: the distribution strategy, the channel model and the distribution analytics — consumed by SD-15.5, SD-15.7, SD-15.1 (demand intelligence into product strategy) and the firm’s governance.

Entities

Consumes: PM-01 Fund & Vehicle, E-01 Legal Entity (the distributors and platforms); the SD-15.3 product range.
Owns: E-25 Account (account_type = register partition) — the fund-register / nominee account held by an intermediary or distributor at the transfer agent; SD-15.4 is the authoritative source for the register partition of E-25, co-equal with SD-12.5 (safekeeping) and SD-11.7 (cash). FO-09 Omnibus Account (specialises E-25 Account, register partition) — the registered account relationship between the fund and each distributor, platform or sub-transfer agent that holds units in omnibus, including the servicing fee terms (12b-1 / sub-TA / revenue-share / platform fee) the manager pays for investor servicing within the omnibus. Promotes the distribution-channel account relationship from a process artefact to a first-class data record.

Standards

The EU cross-border distribution of funds framework and the pre-marketing rules.
The UCITS / AIFMD distribution-passport regimes.

Open extensions

The channel sub-model — direct, intermediated, platform, ETF.
The cross-border registration sub-model.
The Service-Operation-level input/output contracts.